Mainayr Campbround – Steuben, ME

I made a reservation to stay at Mainayr Campground for a week starting Wednesday, August 5th. I called and spoke to who I believe was Cathy, one of the owners. I told her that we didn’t care about full hookups – we didn’t need sewer, but we needed power and water. I asked about space #26 that was near the water and she said it was an RV site with power and water and would accomodate our 35 foot motorhome. The website even states, “Please call us, so we can help you select the best site.”

We drove an hour to get there, looking forward to having power and water after dry camping in Acadia for three weeks.

Upon our arrival, there was no sign indicating that there was an office anywhere – you could only see bathrooms and a laundry room. There was no one at the office, no note on the door and no instructions on how to pay or anything – just pick a site and set up. We drove through and found our site but there was no water. While looking around for water, we noticed tent sites with great water views so we asked David, who drove through, about just dry camping on a particular tent site. He said we could but it would be the same price.

You can dry camp at beautiful Acadia National Park for $20 a night . . . but here you pay $27.

Since we weren’t going to get any discount for NOT using the power, we decided to go back to #26. We filled our tanks, got our RV set up and leveled, plugged in to the power and there was no power on the top cracked outlet. When we plugged into the bottom of the 20 amp outlet, it flipped a breaker immediately. NOTHING WAS ON IN THE RV TO DRAW ANY POWER TO MAKE IT FLIP.

We called to ask about it and were told by Cathy that someone had just been in that site recently. She also said that we couldn’t use our AC – and after hanging up the phone and browsing through the literature provided at the locked front office, I saw that there was an extra $3 charge for using your AC! The fact that there’s a charge for using your AC isn’t on the website – just “Additional charges for utility connections and special sites apply”. If you are going to be staying for a long period of time, there are usually metered sites and you pay electricity charges based on the meter. But here we were to pay $3 a day for whenever we use our AC. You can put that in plain language on the brochure, but not on the website?

David did NOT offer us a discount or a free night’s stay. When we complained about not having power, he said, “I guess you should leave”. And we did.